The Best Intranets for Small Businesses in 2023

Internal communication has come a long way from the early days of intranets. Alongside the recent growth of remote and hybrid work, the number of intranet platforms has expanded like never before. No longer do you have to settle for clunky, outdated software that assaults the eyes and gives you a headache from figuring out how to use it. It’s no surprise that only 13% of employees stuck with these old-fashioned intranets report using them daily.¹

Choosing the right intranet to invest in is important — particularly if you’re a small business with a limited budget. Your intranet needs to create an employee experience that makes collaboration easy. This means an intuitive user interface, but it also means being able to centralise everything your employees need — in an easily accessible way.

You can get this through a platform that’s designed not to just preserve, but to enhance your company’s culture. It does this by creating a consistent experience across both the physical and digital workplaces. The best modern intranets bring everyone in your business together, whenever and wherever they’re working, making work intuitive and easy.

But which one should you choose? Every business has different needs. To help you pick the best intranet for small businesses, here’s a list of 10 of the best intranets in 2023.

Suggested Reading: For more insights on how to ensure a good employee experience, download our free eBook — Solving the Employee Experience Crisis

HulerHub

HulerHub is an employee experience platform that makes it easier for organisations to create personalised employee journeys that deliver the right content, to the right people, at the right time. A modern intranet designed for today’s working practices, HulerHub consolidates resources into one simple-to-use and customisable digital workplace.

HulerHub makes information easily accessible to all users. Administrators can create custom dashboards, while users can personalise their own digital workplace, giving them control over their priorities. Work shouldn’t be hard — if it is, employees’ experience and wellbeing can suffer. HulerHub understands that with the right intranet, technology and employee mental health go hand-in-hand.  

Key Features

• Notification centre: Employees can see what’s new and what’s changed in their digital workplace at a glance, saving them valuable time in getting up to speed and reducing internal communications. All while reducing email.
• Dynamic Search: Employees can quickly find what they need with dynamic search, which surfaces the right content in seconds.
• Customised Tiles: Admins can make content engaging and intuitive by customising them with images, gifs or brand colours. Users can add their own content to their own digital workplace and make it their own, too.
• Collections: Create and share Collections of links both internally and externally — and password protect them for a layer of added security.
• Recognition: Employees can share their successes publicly across the digital workplace to establish a sustainable culture of peer to peer feedback.
• Media Player: Embed audio, video or SCORM content directly into the platform for a streamlined, engaging user experience.
• Vendor Agnostic: Use HulerHub with all of your existing cloud-based content, systems and apps without having to change anything behind the scenes or relying heavily on IT.
• Mobile-Friendly: Remote working goes beyond the desktop. HulerHub’s mobile integration enables your workplace to be as remote as you are, on any device and optimised for mobile.

HulerHub is a collaborative internal communication software for business HR and People teams, it gives better control of the employee experience while uniting knowledge, content and comms in one place. Alongside this, it helps boost adoption of initiatives by increasing visibility, while supercharging productivity by putting everything employees need at their fingertips. And as a plug and play system, HulerHub is ready to go out of the box. 

SharePoint

Microsoft’s answer to the intranet issue, SharePoint is one of the most popular intranets for businesses small and large. If you’ve bought into Microsoft tech, this can be a good option. But if your business hasn’t, or your business has a limited budget, it might be a large conversion job to get SharePoint up to scratch.

Key Features

• Document Sharing: Built around document management, SharePoint allows easy sharing of documents.
• Extendable Workflow: If bought as a package, Microsoft Flow helps to integrate workflows across separate platforms.
• Microsoft Integration: In one way or another, most businesses will use some Microsoft Office 365 products. A Microsoft intranet makes this integration with other products easy.

SharePoint offers a solid base to house your business communications — so long as you’re prepared to fully convert to their software. With the high price tag and need for expert installation, businesses with limited budgets want to make sure this is what their company needs.

Workvivo

Workvivo describes itself as an employee app that keeps teams connected. It’s designed to increase user engagement and improve employee connection with their business. It aims to replace the traditional tools of the workplace communication trade.

Key Features

• Employee Pulse Surveys: Its survey feature helps measure employee engagement through customisable questions and free templates.
• Multi-channel Sharing: Allowing admins to instantly deliver information on whatever channel they want, company-wide.
• Administrative Access: Administrators have enhanced permissions over information, allowing employers to have full control over who sees what, and when.

Workvivo provides a balance of social networking with operational support, enabling users to remain connected to their team throughout the work day. It falls short on true customisability, however, potentially leaving the user feeling restricted in their personal interactions.

Simpplr

The clue is in the name: Simpplr aims to simplify employee communication. Focusing on the hybrid workforce, Simpplr aims to unify your business’ communication and collaboration in the modern, distributed corporate world.

Key Features

• News feed: Simpplr’s scrolling news feed makes company-wide announcements easy for employers to distribute, and easy for employees to read.
• Employee profiles: To help people get to know each other, Simpplr includes employee profiles so colleagues can get to know each other, drive engagement and feel connected. 
• Employee blogs: Employees are able to share their ideas and experience through blogs. Employees can express what they think alongside management, helping build a sense of inclusion.

Simpplr enables content to be easily found and distributed throughout an entire company while prioritising the employee experience. Despite this, it can be difficult to transition from your current intranet, and the lack of a central repository of documents has been flagged several times. 

Instead of giving precise notifications, social features like the news feed can be distracting and overwhelming, as a hard to navigate thread of information, that’s not always relevant to users.

Staffbase

A self-described ‘employee communications management platform’, Staffbase offers two main things: to improve internal communication and maximise engagement with your employees.

Key Features

• ‘Front door intranet’: Staffbase puts internal communication front and centre, with four main pillars: creating content for the intranet, connecting employees together, managing governance and measuring impact.

• Multi-channel sharing: Administrators get total control of their businesses’ communications, able to share across email, the Staffbase app and even Microsoft Teams.

• Employee-generated content: Employees can create and upload content, easily sharing this with colleagues.
• Translation: Staffbase provides translation capabilities for all intranet communication, making sure everyone in your business can understand everything.

Intuitive and with an easy onboarding process, it doesn’t take long to get the whole company set up and ready to go with Staffbase. A lack of admin access appears to be the only downfall, alongside difficulties with mapping multi-stage workflows and user retention.

Happeo

Information chaos surrounds you, communications are breaking down, and that important document just keeps refusing to open. Happeo’s modern intranet offers you a way out, a way to “move fast while staying in control”. 

Key Features

• Instant messaging with search integrations: Employees can talk quickly and easy to get tasks completed, while searching makes all information available at their fingertips.

• Mobile integration: Happeo’s app helps organically connect your workforce and lets people pick up where they let off on desktop.

• Notifications: Simple and clear notifications keep everyone up to date.

Happeo brings your business’s information, doing so in a fun digital workspace. While the user interface is easy to use and the search function makes finding information simple, analytics are somewhat restrained and it can be inflexible in its customisability.

Jostle

Describing itself as an employee success platform, Jostle aims to provide a place where employees can gather together, help each other out and celebrate their shared success. 

Key Features

• Instant messaging with file sharing: Helping everyone to find the necessary information as quickly as they need. The sign-off option can also track who has read important information.
• Multi-channel communications: No more email spam or lost messages, Jostle aims to be your one-stop communications hub.
• Integrations: Integrate with widely used apps like Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 and Slack, and employee data integrations, for example with your Single Sign-on provider.

Generally regarded as an easy to understand and intuitive platform, Jostle makes the onboarding process as simple as possible in order to get employees up and running with their software. Notifications and display refreshing can feel restrictive, however, as they require that extra step of manually completing.

Blink

For frontline workers it is modern for what is an intranet, Blink is a mobile app that connects frontline workers with everything they need — in one place.

Key Features

• Mobility: Blink understands frontline workers are busy. They don’t sit at a desk all day. As a mobile app, it enables employees to get the information they need — on the go.

• Faster communication: Tailor notifications, and pin vital information to the top of the Feed. Guarantee compliance by ensuring employees ‘acknowledge’ critical communications.
• Search integrations: Bringing everything to one app allows users to search across the entire company for what they need.

As a private social network for a constantly moving workforce, Blink helps improve communication — while increasing productivity and retention. Through the integration of existing apps, Blink doesn’t get in the way of other platforms your employees have to use. But if your business isn’t working on the frontline, this intranet isn’t for you.

Claromentis

Claromentis is a modern, customisable intranet sitting at the centre of your digital workplace. It focuses on communication, collaborative learning and knowledge management.

Key Features

• Workflow automation: Reducing manual, repetitive tasks, workflow automation streamlines and automates business processes.

• Extranet portals: Allowing external users, such as clients, to secure access to shared projects.
• Learning management system: Improve your teams’ learning and development with software that allows customisable training experiences.

Claromentis offers a range of services as part of its digital workplace platform. It can take time to fine-tune the software to your business’s needs, while onboarding isn’t always the easiest. Most organiastions already have a lot of in-software apps. Moving this over to Claromentis can mean a big migration task, taking time and effort. But features that enable public sharing of praise, and ease of finding communication, can help bolster employee experience and productivity. 

MangoApps

MangoApps provides a modern company intranet for everyone in your business — from those on the factory floor to those in the office. Based on a social media interface, MangoApps attempts to seamlessly integrate users into their employee experience platform by making it personal and customisable.

Key Features

• News feed: Like the social networks it tries to replicate, employees have access to a scrolling news feed through which information can be distributed company-wide. This is a social intranet.

• Notifications: Push notifications make instantaneous communication easy.
• Multi-channel sharing: Administrators can choose to deliver information to any and all the users through all channels available. This means information can be provided on a need-to-know basis.

Ease of use and its customisability rate highly for MangoApps, making collaboration with remote workers easy and workflows fast. Its analytics tools also mean that employers can get insight into the level of employee engagement. Connections with external tools can be clunky, while its offer to include absolutely everyone in your business makes it difficult to present large amounts of content across groups.

Interact

An industry leader, Interact packs a punch when it comes to internal communications. Focused on connecting people and putting them first, it offers a wide array of intranet abilities.

Key Features

• Homepages: Interact lets you customise your intranet homepage. As the window to your organisation, it lets you customise the homepage to your business’ identity. 

• Content management: Content creation is made simple, allowing your business to tell stories across the organisation.

• Communities: Build virtual communities for groups of common interest, so employees can collaborate across teams and engage with colleagues.

With a range of social and community tools, Interact helps collaboration and employee engagement. Working with a huge range of businesses, while its customisability is a positive feature, it might take some time to tweak the intranet so it’s exactly what your business needs. For small businesses especially, this can take a lot of time and effort.

Unily

Unily is a cloud-based intranet solution designed for enterprise businesses. It aims to level up your business’s communication while boosting productivity and collaboration.

Key Features

• Employee app: Connects every employee with all the information and services they need, whether they’re at the office or on the frontline.

• Rewards and recognition: Custom badges help your business celebrate your workforce and their achievements.

• Analytics: Measure success and learn in real-time what engages employees most.

• Integrations: Eliminate time switching between applications by bringing them together in one place.

Focused on employee engagement, Unily provides an intuitive user interface with customisable workflows. Attractively designed and with well-rounded integration, as an intranet designed for enterprises businesses, smaller businesses will have a hard time with the price and making it fit to scale.

Noodle

Aiming to simplify communication processes and bring together many IT services in one secure site, Noodle is an all-in-one enterprise platform.

Key Features

• Block-based building: Create and edit content with easy point-and-click design. No need for coding. 

• Group access rights: Administrators can set permissions for each user group, allowing a fine-tuned approach to information distribution.
• Task manager: A drag-and-drop approach to tasks allows users to easily view what they have to do and match the platform to their workflow.

Noodle pride themselves on ease of functionality and providing quality customer support, including white label design input and the variety of options available to customise your display. However, cross-app integration can sometimes be an issue when trying to merge documents or bringing in data from other apps. 

Igloo

Cloud-based and fully mobile-enabled, Igloo recognises that modern intranets are no longer optional in a hybrid world. Igloo aims to integrate all levels of communication across your entire business.

Key Features

• User, role and access management: Access to data and information can be selectively granted based on user roles.

• Self-service portal: New employees can work through their onboarding process through a self-service portal, without the need for expert installation.
• Integration: Integrating with Office 365 out of the box and hosted on Microsoft Azure, Igloo mobile app is also supported across iOS, Android, and Windows

With an intuitive user interface and supportive help service, Igloo is an easy-to-use communication platform. Its Microsoft integration allows those using Microsoft products to quickly start working. However, the desktop version requires a log in each time you open Igloo, while its search functionality isn’t quite up to scratch, making resources and information unnecessarily hard to find.

The right intranet for your business

A modern intranet platform is essential in the modern working environment. Without one, employee experience is impacted and productivity suffers. But your business doesn’t just need any intranet — it needs the one that’s right for your business. It’s no surprise that in one study, employee satisfaction increased by almost 50% after a new, modern intranet was brought into the organisation.

HulerHub is that platform. Its flexibility caters to the whole spectrum of business communication, from seamless mobile integration to knowledge-sharing collections. HulerHub enhances the employee experience by reducing friction in challenging areas such as tech-related stress, time management, or work-life balance.

Beyond that, in an age of hybrid working, making sure that employees in the physical workplace and the digital workplace receive a consistent employee experience is crucial. It reduces the potential isolation of those remote or hybrid working while reducing any friction in communication and productivity.

From the employee recognition software (allowing employees to praise and appreciate one another) to the Huler Ticker, an admin tool for releasing company-wide updates, HulerHub can help. HulerHub gives you the necessary tools to create a fully bespoke and consistent employee experience across your whole business, whenever and wherever your people work. Book a demo today.

¹ 7 Surprising Internal Communications Statistics 

² 16 Real Benefits of Intranets You Can’t Ignore in 2021 – Oak Engage